The distribution of information has been a fundamental activity in human societies for many thousands of years. Up until the 1400s, information distribution was primarily carried out orally and through hand-written documents and texts. The invention of the printing press greatly accelerated information distribution and information exchange. In the 1800s and 1900s, development of electronic communications, including the telegraph, telephone, and broadcast technologies, including radio and television, vastly increased the capacity for information exchange and vastly decreased the cost of distributing information. Beginning in the 1950s, the development of electronic computers and computer-driven electronic communications, including various types of high-bandwidth electronic and optical communications media represented another leap in the speed, capacity, and cost-effectiveness of information distribution, ultimately spawning the Internet and Internet-associated methods and systems for distribution of a variety of different types of information, from text and graphics to streaming video, to a wide variety of different types of processor-controlled devices, including electronic laptops, notebooks, tablets and pads, personal computers, mobile phones, and a host of other electronic devices. A modern grade school student, as one example, can currently access, through using an inexpensive personal computer, far more information and a greater diversity of information than was available, at any price, to anyone in the 1960s and 1970s.
While the sheer volume of accessible information and the speed and cost-effectiveness by which information can be accessed have increased with the development of the Internet and Internet-associated methods for information distribution and exchange, many of the current models for information distribution are based on decades-old broadcast-media techniques and paradigms, with limited cost efficiencies. Information providers and information consumers, as well as those who design, develop, manufacture, and sell communications systems and computers, continue to seek new methods and systems for cost-effective information distribution and information exchange.